When Hubert Sumlin died in December 2011, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards quietly covered his funeral expenses. This episode explains why. Born in 1931 in Greenwood, Mississippi and raised in Hughes, Arkansas, Sumlin picked up the guitar at eight and as a boy sneaked into a juke joint to watch Howlin' Wolf perform. In 1954, a year after Wolf relocated to Chicago and lost longtime guitarist Willie Johnson, Wolf sent for the young Arkansan, first as second guitar behind Jody Williams and then, from 1955, as the primary guitarist who would anchor Wolf's band for decades.

We break down what made Sumlin's playing so wild: sharp, angular, unpredictable phrasing and jarring silences that engineered tension inside the 12-bar form. We also cover Wolf's surprising decision to send him to the Chicago Conservatory of Music, his brief 1956 defection to r ...